Screwing Up Artificial Intelligence Could Be Disastrous, Experts Say

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From smartphone apps like Siri to features like facial
recognition of photos, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a
part of everyday life. But humanity should take more care in
developing AI than with other technologies, experts say.

Science and tech heavyweights Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen
Hawking have warned that intelligent machines could be one of
humanity's biggest existential threats. But throughout
history, human inventions, such as fire, have also posed dangers.
Why should people treat AI any differently?

"With fire, it was OK that we screwed up a bunch of times," Max
Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, said April 10 on the radio show Science Friday. But
in developing
artificial intelligence, as with nuclear weapons, "we really
want to get it right the first time, because it might be the only
chance we have," he said. [ 5
Reasons to Fear Robots ]

On the one hand, AI has the potential to achieve enormous good in
society, experts say. "This technology could save thousands of
lives," whether by
preventing car accidents or avoiding errors in medicine, Eric
Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research lab in Seattle,
said on the show. The downside is the possibility of creating a
computer program capable of continually improving itself that "we
might lose control of," he added.

For a long time, society has believed that things that are
smarter must be better, Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at
the University of California, Berkeley, said on the show. But
just like the Greek myth of King Midas, who transformed
everything he touched into gold, ever-smarter machines may not
turn out to be what society wished for. In fact, the goal of
making machines smarter may not be aligned with the goals of the
human race, Russell said.

For example, nuclear power gave us access to the almost unlimited
energy stored in an atom, but "unfortunately, the first thing we
did was create an atom bomb," Russell said. Today, "99 percent of
fusion research is containment," he said, and "AI is going to go
the same way."

Tegmark called the development of AI "a race between the growing
power of technology and humanity's growing wisdom" in handling
that technology. Rather than try to slow down the former,
humanity should invest more in the latter, he said.

At a conference in Puerto Rico in January organized by the
nonprofit Future of Life Institute (which Tegmark co-founded), AI
leaders from academia and industry (including Elon Musk) agreed
that it's time to redefine the goal of making machines as smart
and as fast as possible. The goal should now be to make machines
beneficial for society. Musk donated $10 million to the institute
in order to further that goal.

After the January conference, hundreds of scientists, including
Musk,
signed an open letter describing the potential benefits of
AI, yet warned of its pitfalls.